Creating the right, helpful user persona for your product

Do you know how to correctly set user personas for your product?

Most teams think they do. Most are wrong.

They start with the classic checklist.
Age. Gender. Location. Education. A nice stock photo. A cute fictional name.
And they believe they have crafted a “user persona”.

But the problem is simple. If you take only demographics, you can easily end up with something absurd. The attached image makes it painfully obvious. According to demographic data alone, both King Charles and Ozzy Osbourne could belong to the exact same persona group. Both are male, born in 1948, raised in the UK, wealthy and famous, married twice, living in big estates or castles. On paper, they look identical. In realit,y they could not be more different in how they think, behave, decide, buy, communicate, or use technology.

So should both King Charles and Ozzy land in the same user bucket
Well
It depends.

This is where most misunderstandings about personas begin. A persona is not a biography. It is not a dating profile. And it cannot be reduced to demographics pasted into a slide deck that nobody reads after the project kickoff.

A user persona is a made-up character that represents a pattern of behavior. Not a person. A pattern. A repeatable, observable, measurable pattern that appears when groups of users experience similar problems, goals, jobs to be done, frustrations, motivations, and habits. Your persona is not meant to mimic a human. It is meant to represent a shared way of interacting with your product.

This is why demographic-based personas often mislead product teams. They are simple to create, they look polished, and they feel intuitive. But they are usually wrong for most digital products, because real usage rarely splits according to age groups or income brackets. Real usage splits around behaviors.

A better starting point is your product analytics. Look at how people actually use your product. Follow the actions, not the ages. Find clusters of users who behave in similar ways. Maybe they binge features in bursts. Maybe they return at predictable intervals. Maybe they never explore anything outside the homepage. Maybe they jump through five screens in a row because they know what they want. Maybe they wander because they do not.

For a music app like Spotify, personas based on pure demographics make no sense. But behavior-based personas instantly reveal patterns such as:

• Casual free listeners

• Committed paid subscribers

• Active creators and artists

Within each of those buckets, you can go deeper, exploring subpatterns like genre loyalists versus music discoverers, or creators who publish weekly versus creators who publish once a year. But the foundation is always behavior first, narrative second.

If we go back to our two gentlemen from 1948, they would never fall into the same persona bucket for a product like Spotify. Charles would clearly be a Paid listener with predictable habits and traditional patterns of consumption. Ozzy would be a Creator with a completely different relationship to the platform, a different set of needs, a different definition of success, and a different path to value.

Now imagine a completely different product. Let us say a medicine tracking app helping older adults remember their daily doses and monitor intake. Suddenly, these two very different men might indeed end up in the same persona group. Not because they share a demographic profile but because they share the same behavioral problem. They both need help with consistency, reminders, ease of tracking, and clarity around their medication. They would follow similar usage flows and face similar obstacles. That is what matters to your product team.

Personas are about behavioral patterns, not biographical details. They are about identifying what unites groups of users in their relationship with your product. And the backstories we attach to them have only one purpose. They help the team remember the persona. They provide a human anchor. They trigger empathy, clarity, and a shared mental model. They make it easier to discuss trade-offs, prioritisation, and experience quality because the persona becomes a short form for a real user problem.

Demographics can still matter. They help you understand broader market realities. They influence the shape of your onboarding. They impact your copywriting, your accessibility decisions, your device support, and sometimes your pricing model. But demographics support persona creation. They do not define it. Personas represent an imagined user that mirrors the typical patterns in your data, not an invented biography that ignores your data.

So the real question is not whether Charles and Ozzy should share a persona.
The real question is this:

• Do they behave in ways that create similar patterns in your product

• Do they face similar barriers

• Do they succeed in similar ways

• Do they struggle in similar ways

If the answer is yes, then they belong together, regardless of their fame, age, wealth, or lifestyle. If not, they do not.

This is the mindset shift every product team needs. Personas exist to help us build better products, not prettier slides.

Do you agree with this approach?

Which personas do you see in your favorite products?

And more importantly, which personas does your own product actually serve, versus which personas you wish it served.